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Felix Mendelssohn: Composers
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Felix Mendelssohn was a German composer (a writer of music), conductor (the leader of a musical group), pianist, and organist. He developed a basic classical approach to musical composition with fresh romantic harmonies and expressiveness.
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By the time he was a teenager, Felix Mendelssohn was already an excellent pianist and composer. And Mendelssohn was very talented in other areas. In addition to German (his native language), Mendelssohn spoke French, English, and Italian. He was ... a very good painter. And he became quite famous as a conductor.
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Felix and his elder sister, Fanny, received their early piano instruction from their mother. In 1816, on a visit to Paris, France, he studied with the pianist Marie Bigot. The next year he began formal studies in composition with Carl Friedrich Zelter, a composer greatly admired by the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Also as a child, Mendelssohn took a keen interest in drawing and painting and took lessons in foreign languages.
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Mendelssohn's first public appearance occurred at the age of 9. Famous musicians gave concerts every Sunday at his father's house; in addition to broadening the musical horizons of the gifted boy, they enabled him, as a budding composer, to test many of his works as he wrote them. In 1819 he entered the Singakademie, and from that time on compositions flowed steadily from his pen. In 1820, for example, he produced two piano sonatas, a violin sonata, songs, a quartet for men's voices, a cantata, and a short opera.
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In 1825 Abraham Mendelssohn took Felix to Paris, where among other musicians then resident in the French capital he met two most popular dramatic composers of the age. Rossini and Meyerbeer, and lived on terms of intimacy with Hummel, Kalkbrenner, Rode, Baillot, Herz, and many other artists of European celebrity.
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Mendelssohn's gifts were phenomenal. He was a good painter, had wide literary knowledge, and wrote brilliantly. He was a superb pianist, a good violist, an exceptional organist, and an inspiring cond. He had an amazing mus. memory. He was generous to other musicians, and keen to raise standards of popular taste. His genius as a composer led Bülow to describe him as the most complete master of form after Mozart.
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